Hackaday Superconference 2023 – Day 3 – Simon!

In the final day of Hackaday Superconference 2023, I feel like I started to get into the groove of the conference. During the afternoon, I found a spot to play around more with my badge while within earshot of a couple of sessions that–frankly–were beyond my level of understanding in electronics. However, spending time with the badge and its hardware made me want to play with it, so I decided to try my hand at making a simple game. I learned how to draw rectangles on the screen and decided to make a Simon game where the game takes turns with you reciting a series of colors/button presses.

After tinkering with some basic programming, I smashed some code together to maintain game state in a couple of arrays. I fought with the async-but-not-really timers for “illuminating” the lights of the different quadrants and finally got something that was playable!

The evening got really good with a truly delightful session by Gella. She shared the how and why of developing companion bots while allowing the audience to pass around her dragon, Nova, along with a magic wand that had the ability to sense a color from a surface and transmit that color to lights on the dragon. It was a super fun interactive session!

The cap for the night was the badge hacking award ceremony. Going into it, I wasn’t sure how it would work or if I would even try to share anything. Fortunately, it was cheerful and fluid: a call for people who did badge hacks in a particular category went out and anyone could jump in and present their work to the crowd. Among them were some gems, some funny mishaps, and a lot of joy. I did present Simon and while I didn’t win, I did have a great time.

My fork of Vectorscope is available with Simon, along with the other stuff.